Is it normal for a child to twitch while sleeping?

Children love to move around and have high energy levels, so they are often more restless when they sleep at night than adults. This is normal because it is normal for the body to be overtired and to have certain symptoms when sleeping at night. If parents find that their children suddenly have intermittent convulsions while sleeping, and these symptoms have never occurred before, they must consider that the child is feeling unwell and parents need to pay attention to it.

It is abnormal for a child to twitch while sleeping at night;

According to experts, benign childhood epilepsy is accompanied by central-temporal spikes, generalized tonic-clonic epilepsy during wakefulness, and epilepsy is accompanied by continuous spikes during slow-wave sleep. Recent studies have shown that frontal lobe epilepsy also occurs more frequently during sleep. A typical example is autosomal dominant nocturnal frontal lobe epilepsy, in which seizures almost always occur during sleep at night. Certain special epileptic discharge patterns are also common during sleep, such as electrical status epilepticus during sleep (ESES).

ESES can be seen in multiple epilepsy syndromes, such as epilepsy with sustained spikes during slow-wave sleep, benign epilepsy in children with central-temporal spikes, Landau-Kleffner syndrome (acquired epileptic aphasia), etc.

Once sleep epilepsy is diagnosed, regular anti-epileptic treatment is generally required, otherwise repeated attacks may affect neuropsychiatric functions. Other sleep disorders, such as night terrors and nightmares, generally do not require special treatment and are mostly self-limiting. Although some sleep disorders such as narcolepsy and OSAS (obstructive sleep apnea syndrome) require medication or device intervention, the prognosis is mostly good. Therefore, the understanding of sleep-related epilepsy mainly lies in the differential diagnosis from other common sleep disorders to avoid incorrect treatment.